Billionaires Will Disrupt Death If It's The Last Thing They Do

Like space travel and imaginary tubes, the extension of the human life span is being financed by the private interests of tech billionaires.

"We still can’t bribe our way out of dying. But that isn’t stopping the these five ultra-rich immortality financiers," writes Adam Leith Gollner, author of The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever.

There's Peter Thiel, who has "invested heavily" in organizations like the SENS Foundation, which is devoted to developing "rejuvenation biotechnologies," although nothing's panned out yet:

After he sank millions into a Silicon Valley nanotechnology start-up called Halcyon Molecular, its founder, William Andregg, told TechCrunch.com he plans to live for “millions, billions, hundreds of billions of years.” Halcyon Molecular quietly went out of business last summer.

According to Gollner, Google cofounder Sergey Brin "has the strongest chance of lending legitimacy to the quest for eternal life." Under Brin's orders, Google has provided "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to Singularity University, and hired noted futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Brin also chose to get married on David Copperfield’s private island in the Bahamas (where the magician says he’s found the fountain of youth).

Jury's still out on that one.

Then there's Russian transhumanist multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov who launched the 2045 Initiative, and offers the Harold Camping-esque promise that humans be immortal by the year 2045 . . . just as soon as we "make a leap into artificial, machine bodies."

But the billionaire who brings the most fiery passion to the cause, by far, is Larry Ellison, who "gives out more than $40 million" to the Ellison Medical Foundation to understand "lifespan development processes"

“Death makes me very angry,” admits Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation and the fifth-richest person in the world (his net worth is $43 billion, according to Forbes). “It doesn't make any sense to me. Death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?”